Message to Khatami

By Azadeh Moaveni
After Deputy Interior Minister Mostafa Tajzadeh boldly secured a reformist victory in last year's parliamentary elections, observers expected the hard-line Guardian Council to take revenge. The time for retribution has finally come: last week, a judge sentenced Tajzadeh to one year in prison and barred him from supervising elections for six years for alleged vote-rigging in the Majlis election.
Rather than interpret Tajzadeh's sentencing as a sign that conservatives intend to manipulate voting in the June presidential elections, which Tajzadeh would have supervised, reformists see the jailing of yet another Khatami ally as part of an accelerated hard-line campaign to discourage the president from seeking re-election altogether. They believe that the conservatives, by blatantly antagonising Khatami, plan to make re-election a nasty fight, which the notoriously cautious president will want to avoid.
Following his sentencing, Tajzadeh told the state news agency, "Some people are angry about the way people voted [in the parliamentary election], but this is not my problem." Pleading innocent, he claimed to have done his best to "prevent the plot that aimed to illegally annul the elections."
The reformist sweep of the elections prompted the hard-line Guardian Council, a supervisory body, to accuse the Interior Ministry of vote-tampering and to call for a recount of nearly one million votes. The recount profited the wildly unpopular former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who ultimately resigned his parliamentary seat in humiliation.
The most likely result of the Tajzadeh trial will be to make a hero of yet another reformist.
Tajzadeh skipped the speech he was scheduled to give at a student meeting at Tehran University the day after his sentencing, but a throng of students waved his photo about, shouting that his only crime was "standing up to the guardians of power."
Tajzadeh already had a brush with the conservatives late last summer, when he was blamed for unrest that broke out in the city of Khoramabad. The investigation of that incident, in which security forces stormed a student congress, has yet to conclude, but could lead to Tajzadeh being barred from holding government office for at least three years.
In an apparent effort to purge the Interior Ministry of its reformist leadership, Minister Abdolvahed Mousavi-Lari, a Khatami confidante, has also been accused of electoral fraud and risks being summoned before the Special Clerical Court. Governor of Tehran Ayatollah Azarmi was sentenced, in the Tajzadeh trial, to a year and a half in prison and a four-year suspension from civil service.
Reformists fear that the conservative effort to question the fairness of election results is an attempt to create public apathy and low election turnout. Political participation has been a key goal, and major asset, of President Khatami; if elections are made to look like an empty ritual, where real power is arranged behind the scenes, Iranians may be less inclined to turn out for the presidential vote. According to this theory, the fewer votes the incumbent Khatami wins, the easier it will be to manage him.
With the presidential election deadline still three months off, the president's brother, MP Mohamed Reza Khatami, has tried to cool student anger over the court ruling, cautioning them that the conservative "scenario will only be realised if we agree to play the part reserved for us."
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